Gucci’s newest Instagram models are aliens

Do you think “These clothes are out of this world” is a little too on-the-nose as a tagline for Gucci’s new campaign? (Gucci: contact me if interested). The campaign, which notes is probably for Gucci’s upcoming Autumn / Winter ‘17 line, stars aliens and androids from far-away places in the galaxy, like the fictional planet “Xoph,” a water planet, and “unknown.”

Last night, the fashion house started posting videos on Instagram featuring different aliens (okay, possibly models dressed as aliens) standing in front of green screens. Each video is captioned with the alien’s age and planet of origin, while the alien in question acts out a brief scene with an unseen producer. Shipley, age 7, who was born in a construction facility, says, “I’m not like you humans… for me, happiness is more of a matter of differential calculus.”

The posts are hashtagged #gucciandbeyond, but aside from that there’s little in the way of actual information about what Gucci is doing (I didn’t even find it useful that all the aliens spoke English, despite the fact that this robot claims to know six million dialects).

But this is not the first offbeat Instagram campaign for Gucci. Last month, the company paired writers and artists and asked them to make Gucci-themed Instagram memes for a campaign called #TFWGucci.

#TFWGucci Sebastian Tribbie Matheson @Youvegotnomale is a ruthless meme maker. The snark starts with his account’s name. In between taking selfies and posting them to his 40,000 followers on Instagram, he creates images that take aim at popular fashion and social culture. No target is safe, from ordering on Seamless to cliché emoji usage. Here, Sebastian uses the starter pack meme, in which a group of images and objects are clustered together to represent the stereotype of a particular style or personality. For #TFWGucci he takes on Gucci, adopting the brand’s recent hallmarks, like embroidery, patches, and 70s glasses. @harinef and @petrafcollins make appearances, as does the #LeMarchédesMerveilles timepiece. Gucci = owned. — Text by @kchayka. Read more through link in bio.

A post shared by Gucci (@gucci) on Mar 20, 2017 at 11:24pm PDT

An old-school luxury brand selling clothes via memes and aliens is unusual, but the juxtaposition of high-brow and low-brow works — especially on Instagram, where your feed is probably both aspirational and familiar. Maybe Gucci used to just be your very rich neighbor, but now it’s trying to be your weird friend too.